Make a voluntary payment

What it pays for

Keeping the data current, which is most of the work: the rent figures come from the Office for National Statistics every month, and every new tribunal decision has to be read and added. That is what makes the comparison worth anything.

It also lets us carry the cost of applications for renters who cannot meet it. The people with the strongest cases are often the ones with the least room in the month, and a challenge that does not happen for want of a few pounds is the worst outcome this service can produce.

What it actually costs to run

Not a list of departments. These are the things that genuinely have invoices against them, and the ones that would stop first if nobody paid anything.

Solicitors, and people who know this area

The terms, the privacy policy and every page that says what the law is have to be read by somebody qualified, and read again when the law moves. The Renters’ Rights Act came into force in 2026 and is still settling, so this is not a one-off.

Reading the tribunal’s decisions

Decisions are published as documents, not as data. Turning a few thousand of them into something you can compare your rent against costs machine time per decision, and human time whenever the machine gets one wrong.

Keeping the figures current

The ONS publishes rents monthly and revises them afterwards, so the whole series is reloaded and versioned rather than appended to. New decisions arrive every week.

Hosting, the database, and storing your documents

Two and a half million postcodes, three and a half million rent observations, and every tenancy agreement held securely for as long as an application is open.

Maps and email

Map tiles are charged per view. Email is charged per message, and an application sends four of them with the whole bundle attached.

Professional indemnity insurance

Held so that if we get somebody’s application wrong, there is something behind the apology. It is the largest fixed cost on this list.

The card fee on this payment

Stripe takes a percentage and a fixed amount from whatever you give, which is why very small payments cost us money to accept.

The data itself is free, and that is deliberate. The Office for National Statistics, the Energy Performance register and the tribunal’s own decisions are all published under the Open Government Licence. Nobody is charging us for the figures. The cost is in reading them, checking them, and keeping them current.